Ola Hansson - Legacy

Legacy

A productive writer, his writings are uneven. However, he is considered today a pioneer within modern Swedish poetry, who reshaped nature poetry; he has sometimes been called the only one among late-19th century Swedish poets who really absorbed the influence of French Symbolism and "fin-de-siècle" moods. In 1906 Vilhelm Ekelund, a major poet of the next generation, published a paeanic poem hailing him as the like of Pindar, the bard of his province and a poetic forerunner. Ekelund, like Hansson, was a native of the rural southern province of Scania and felt in opposition to the literary fashions of Stockholm; he felt these had rejected Hansson and driven him into exile. From this point on, Ola Hansson began to be reappraised, and in his final years an (unsatisfying) edition of his collected works began to appear in Sweden (greeted by the author's angry pointing out of its shortcomings in newspaper articles dispatched from his exile). He has remained, in particular, an invoked hero of Scanian writers.

In 1913 he was awarded the first scholarship in memory of Gustaf Fröding, elected by Swedish university students.